At approximately 11:20 p.m. on Aug. 13, 1984, Claire de Boer stepped into the north end of Cayuga Lake, near the Village of Cayuga, and began to swim.

She didn't stop swimming till she reached Allen H. Treman State Marine Park in Ithaca, nearly 40 miles and more than 20 hours later.

Thursday is the 30th anniversary of her completing that epic journey down the longest of the Finger Lakes, fulfilling a childhood dream and setting a record that no one has challenged since. She is still just the second person to swim Cayuga's length; the first, Russ Chaffee, did it 19 years before de Boer, and took nearly 40 hours to complete the journey, with swim fins.

Claire's is truly a remarkable achievement, a testament to the powers of the human mind, body and spirit, and a feat that she and those close to her still marvel at from time to time.

"It's still something that's hard for us all to comprehend," said long-time Ithaca High swim coach Roy Staley, Claire's swim mentor since she was a young girl. "You think about it and you get a picture and a concept of what took place, but to me, the more I think about it as the time goes by, it's not something that everybody jumps out and can do.

"Even now, looking back on it, it's so incredible how it came together," he said.

I was in my "rookie" year at The Journal at the time, and lucky enough to be out on the lake to witness Claire's remarkable swim. In fact, I'm still the proud owner of one of the "Never This Fore Befar" T-shirts that Claire's friend, Donna Tatro, had made up for the event.

Now 54 and the mother of two "awesome, awesome children," Claire does not live in the past but uses it to inform the present and future.

"Life is life," she said Tuesday by phone from Hershey, Pa., where she's the director of the Center Stage arts program at Penn State Hershey Medical Center. "Things move on, and I think a true achievement is only an achievement if you can apply it to the other areas of your life that are not so easy. So sure, I think about it and I still love to swim.

"I'm asked, 'Did I conquer it?' and I don't feel like I conquered it," she said. "Big water is scary. Everything aligned, I had great conditions for swimming, I had a great, collaborative crew and good temperature. I know that there was also a lot of luck involved, and I know that if that were to define me, that swim, then what a shame. I was so young and had a whole life ahead of me."

Roy remembered Claire, then a senior at Cornell, calling him up in the winter of '84 saying she wanted to swim the lake and asking him to help her. He agreed, knowing that she would do it regardless.

"Having coached Claire since she was 6, 7, 8 years old, and knowing how stubborn and persevering she is, I knew she was going to do this," he said. "And we had to plan it and go through it. And a lot of that work, of course, she took on herself, in conjunction with her family and everybody else we needed for the support to make it work."

Claire certainly had the right genetic make-up for something as grueling as a 38-mile lake swim. Her parents, Tobias and Joan de Boer, were both long-distance runners at the time, and Joan is still very active, having just completed both the Cayuga Lake Triathlon on Aug. 4 and the Women Swimmin' event this past Sunday on the lake.

She remembers deciding at a very young age that she would one day swim the length of the lake, after swimming its width many times as a child with her siblings, Maarten and Yvette, and family friends. Ironically, the young Claire at first refused to join the rest in the cross-lake swims, calling the water "gross" and preferring the chlorinated splendor of a swimming pool.

"Finally I agreed to do it," she said with a laugh, "but on my back, so I wouldn't put my face in that water."

After swimming 16-mile Skaneateles Lake a month earlier as a dry run, Claire was ready on the night of Aug. 13, 1984, to give it her best shot. With Staley, her sister and her father in a motorboat — they graciously allowed photographer Richard Marshall and me onboard, too — and three other support vessels nearby, Claire began her swim under a full moon, unafraid but uncertain of what the next several hours might bring.

"There was never a feeling of dread or panic, of 'I'm not going to make it,'" she said. "I knew I might not make it, but it wasn't a direct thought."

The first half of her swim went better than anyone expected, with Claire clicking off the miles at approximately a 65-strokes-per-minute pace. She wanted to start at night due to fear. "It's kind of scary swimming at night," she said prior to the swim, "so I want to get it out of the way while I'm fresh."

She reported feeling nauseated for about 75 percent of the journey, but forced down necessary food and drink at regular intervals. As per international rules governing long-distance swims, she couldn't be touched or assisted in any way during the swim, so Claire and her sister rigged up a hockey stick with a container on the end that Yvette would reach out to her as she swam.

Claire did recall at one point late in the swim, when she was "losing my mind" and craved something she would otherwise never want. Friend and crew member Kevin Markwardt — now the swim coach at Ithaca College — went off in a motorboat and returned with the object of her desire: a Coca-Cola.

Both Staley and Claire recall her "hitting the wall," though the timing varies depending on who you ask. Roy thought it was with about an hour to go, while Claire remembered it being several hours earlier, about the same time she craved the soda. But they recall the actual near-meltdown the same way: She was crying and, despite continuing to stroke and kick, not moving.

"The emotions weren't something we'd investigated, but we'd talked about it in advance," Staley said. "We went up to the village of Cayuga one afternoon and just sat out on the lake and talked. We talked about how you're going to go out at night and you're going to hit a barrier at some point, and the urge to quit is going to be overwhelming."

Roy said she paddled, crying and not moving, for a good 15 minutes before finally breaking through the wall. She finished swimming stronger and faster than she had before her meltdown.

"At that stage, she was released," he said. "It's kind of like a runner catching their second wind, and everything gets easy after that. The spirit's released, the soul is one with your spirit and desires, and everything connects. And from that point home, the smile was on her face, everything was on."

With her finishing all but assured, the big concern was to make sure that she exited the water and walked to shore without anyone aiding or touching her, which by international rules would have negated the swim. A flotilla of boats and kayaks greeted Claire as she entered the inlet and made her way to the marina, and Claire recalls exiting the water across the marina entrance from where a large crowd had gathered, just to make sure nobody touched her.

And after being horizontal and weightless on the water for nearly a full day, "I didn't know if I'd be able to walk," she said. "I had no idea of how it was going to go. But I just got right up."

That's one of Staley's most vivid memories.

"She stood right up and walked up the ramp, smile on her face from ear to ear, which after all that time was pretty remarkable," he said. "She had succeeded."

Finding that 30-year-old T-shirt of mine brought back some great memories, but one thing I didn't know was how the slogan came to be. Claire said she'd done a radio interview several days before her swim, and when the interviewer asked her if she'd ever attempted anything like this, she answered, "No, I've never gone this fore befar." She was embarrassed at the flub, and her friends made sure she wouldn't live it down by putting it on a T-shirt.

I asked Claire, now the mother of two children who are about the age she was when she stepped into Cayuga's waters and history, if she thought the feat had changed her in any way.

"Of course, but anything we do that's big does," she said. "It's part of my story. In a way, it was an expression of me — I have a passion for swimming, my genes allow me to do endurance things, and I'm pleasantly stubborn.

"I like to think that I've carried the lessons into the rest of my life, the way we all need to do with anything that happens," she added. "It's just part of my story and I've moved on, and yes I still love to swim, and yes I still love Ithaca and the lake. How's that?"

Tom Fleischman is The Journal's sports editor; his column appears weekly. He can be reached at tfleischma@gannett.com.

A photocopy of an Ithaca Journal article from Aug. 15, 1984, a day after Claire de Boer completed her 38-mile swim of Cayuga Lake.(Photo: PROVIDED)